The AI Researcher: From Information Overload to Active Knowledge Synthesis (Part 1)

Voiceover Artist | 00:00

Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a more fulfilling, productive life? Then you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to ProductivityCast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. Here are your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinault with Francis Wade and Art Gelwick.

Ray Sidney Smith | 00:18

Welcome back, everybody, to Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I’m Ray Sidney Smith.

Francis Wade | 00:24

And I’m Francis Wade.

Ray Sidney Smith | 00:25

Welcome, gentlemen, and welcome to our listeners to this episode of ProductivityCast. This week, we are going to be continuing our dive into the world of artificial intelligence, which I like to call smart software, with another episode in our series of the AI-powered professionals. 

So today we’re going to be focusing on research and what I’m coining here is the AI researcher persona and how these new tools are really transforming the process of learning and researching and knowledge work for us. We’re moving to a place where we can understand retrieval as basically active knowledge synthesis. And we’re going to be talking through some of the challenges that folks face with regard to information overload and otherwise. 

So let’s first talk through the problems with research today. What do you find are the good or the positives around research today? And what are some of the problems that we experience? One of them we’re going to talk about, which is information overload. But there are others that are out there. 

And then we can give that context. Color with regard to how we can use AI as a researcher to help us with that process or those problems. 

So what do you feel like are the primary problems today with research.

Francis Wade | 01:47

I think in the past, very much a hit or miss kind of proposition. Where if you could find someone who had done the research… Answer the research questions that you have. You were extremely lucky. And the game was, how can I increase odds of success how can I be luckier So that meant that dwelling in places like Research Gate. Maybe at academia.edu. 

Yeah. But ResearchGate was my goal, though. And For certain topics, especially the two that I specialize in, which are task management and strategic. Planning. I’ve pretty much got to the bottom of everything that I could find easily. It took a few years for each one, but I’ve sort of gotten to what I think is like the bottom. Where I read what they have to say. And I’ve noticed sort of where all the faults are why in neither field the research academics do is very useful in the real world? 

You know, it’s very esoteric and it’s meaningful. Academics tend to write for each other. And for journals. And for advancement in their field. They don’t like to go into areas that are cross bouldery that I like to mix and match different fields. They don’t go interdisciplinary. It makes a real mess of the nice, clean, lines that they like to follow. And I don’t like to go into areas that, you know, If you become an expert in an area where there’s no conferences and no journals, no chairs and no departments anywhere in the world. If you go into an area like that, you know, you’re sort of dooming yourself to obsolescence. 

So with those problems, It means that for the two areas that I’m interested in, there’s a, Not a lot of useful research. There is to find. 

So finding something useful used to be a lucky proposition. And I would have to basically find someone who has enough experience in both areas to be able to do research in both areas so that they would have the questions. And finding that was like a needle in a haystack. 

So it’s always been difficult in the two areas that I Try to find research written on. It’s always been an uphill struggle.

Augusto Pinaud | 04:02

I think it’s important to make an distinction between professional researching practices and the non-professional one. I agree in the professional researching the impact of AI has been incredible because now these people who Say. Knows better when they’re trying to search and look into information. Cinta was not available. When you go to the noun informal research. It’s interesting because I feel that we used to have Three levels of research, bad research, middle ground research, and good research. And now with the AI, we have gone and disappeared that middle because people think that they can find the answer that they believe is legit. Doesn’t matter if it’s true or it’s fake information or what it is. They can go bump into any of these agents. Get an answer. And because of that, people stopped digging. Into is this really legit? But when you think in the world of productivity, When the first book of David Allen came out, we were talking about 2001, It was hard to find the information. It was hard to find the principles behind unless you have access to them. 25 years later, you can find A ton of information. The question now is, How did you know that information is legit or not? And that’s why I think that middle ground has disappeared. You have the people who goes and do a prompt, and get an answer and assume Dad. The answer they’re getting is the truth. And because of that, that’s the stop of the research. 

So what was part of the issues 20 years ago is, okay, I want to research this topic and now I have 20 books. No, they just go, ask two questions, get what they think is a truth answer, and take that That’s a fact. Then you have the other level that is the people who are going to get that and try to figure it out. Is this a fact? They’re going to try to dig out or it’s not a fact. And what is the fact? What is interesting for me with AI is That middle ground, that guy who will have get that fact and tried to see why. I don’t look legit or not legit. That disappeared. What I have seen is people getting the output that AI is giving them I’m taking them. It’s a truth. It’s an absolute truth that is even more scarier. And I have seen this In academic settings, I have seen this in professional settings, okay, where people go What is the obsolescence of this? Okay. Can you repeat that? I didn’t get an answer. 

So when that is, they never really dig. Hold on, did you want to do the vendor? Did you, did the chat GPT was floating you know, That, I mean, how been… Wonderfully. Last week. My son is a baseball fan, so he was watching the baseball and he wanted to see the score, so he asked, Madame Eyre. And But I may say, the game has not started. It was time for the game to start. That’s true. The radio. Fuck. And you know, like, You’ve got me in the life. Damn, man. Give us whatever is for them. I’ve nothing to do. With the reality. And it was a great moment of, teach an opportunity because of that. If we will have the initial answer, what most people do, This other game has no authority. Okay, and you move on. But the reality is minimal. The game had started. We were in the middle of the game and there was a different score than what she was giving us on the third answer. And that is what Most people don’t notice when they go into this research. AI will give you an answer. The question is if that answer is actually the answer or.

Ray Sidney Smith | 08:11

Not. When it really matters, right? Learning that the game is not trivial, maybe not to your son, but to the rest of the world, you know, when it’s… I will.

Augusto Pinaud | 08:19

Make sure to tell him that right thing, that when the game is on, it’s not trivial. You are going down in that scale of people he likes. You’re going down, my friend.

Ray Sidney Smith | 08:27

The unfortunate part is if you say, hey, I just swallowed this thing mineral. Is it toxic to me if I’m on this type of medication? And all of a sudden, ChachiPT or otherwise will just confidently be like, no, you’re going to be fine. 

And then, you know, you will have some kind of health impact because of it. The reality here, though, is that humans have been doing this on a slower speed than A.I., for forever, right? 

I mean, we make just as many mistakes and the information that it’s based on is that which is in Google and the rest of the public web. Remember that the LLMs are trained on that which is public information. And so there are lots of parts of the private web that are held away, which I think are probably the best parts of the web, right? Because in a private space is where people give their most valuable information, right? It’s going to be behind a paywall. It’s going to be gated in some way, shape or form. Inclusive information is where someone’s going to teach a course that’s going to go into every step of some particular thing. 

So since I think most of the best parts of human knowledge are hidden from LLMs, we get the dumbest parts, basically. And the interesting thing through this is that even with the dumbest parts, we still have come up with large language models that have been incredibly competent at being able to do what we want it to do. And so what we’ve learned is that, of course, bigger LLMs, more training doesn’t necessarily to get better results. There’s kind of a sweet spot. And we’re going to have to start seeing how specialized models, not just LLMs, maybe small language models, maybe other types of models are basically utilized for us to be able to get the work done that we need to more efficiently. But more accurately. 

So I see this as, again, we’re in its infancy. And so there are many travails. I think all of them are human. I don’t think many of them are technological. These are human problems. Problems with information overload, problems with basically passivity when it comes to information verification. All of these things that we can think about as problems with regard to research today are facilitated by technology because we have access to it all. Is really fundamentally us going to the news as though it’s a buffet. As opposed to curating a set of news that makes sense to us and consuming that news and then moving on, people get addicted to the news. They get addicted to running down these rabbit holes of content. And really not having a purpose-driven lifestyle. Perspective on what they’re trying to find. And so I think those are really some of the big ticket problems. I think there is a sheer amount of information that is being given to us every day. We are getting bombarded with not just advertising, but we are getting bombarded with lots and lots of general information that we otherwise didn’t have access to in our lives before. That includes news, right? Once upon a time, our brains got very limited amounts of news. There was a town crier, perhaps. People talked and gossip was most of the news. And now today, thanks to the internet, you will find out within minutes if there was some kind of environmental event that happened across the world, right? And now all of a sudden you have to think about the people there that you don’t know, right? You may not know them, maybe you do know them, but that’s a good thing on one level, right? Because if something happens in Jamaica, like there’s a hurricane or a tropical storm, we’re going to find out pretty quickly and be able to show our caring concern for Francis. But If there’s something happening in a part of the world where we don’t know anyone, we still find out that information, whether we like it or not. And that’s not necessarily helpful to us in the grand scheme of things because we can’t do anything about it. We don’t know the people there. And as much as you want to have care and concern for everyone, you can’t know eight or nine billion people and care and concern about every single one of them. And so there’s this kind of mediation that we need to do in terms of how much information we take in related to that care and concern aspect of our lives.

Augusto Pinaud | 12:32

It is interesting you mentioned that in the current event, in the moment that we are recording this show. With all the negative news coming. In the world. One of the things that is interesting is to see people who can digest that information. And the people who is right now being analysis paralysis called are getting so much input on The gas prices, the problems here, all those things that they can’t handle that amount of use. They simply can’t. And what is producing for people is an incredible amount of anxiety, an incredible amount of stress. It will be very interesting, sadly, to see In the next three to six months, the impact in depression and anxiety and all these things, because in a way, the news are designed to be very addictive. And if you are not very aware how addictive they can be, it’s just For every news they get 100. Headlines don’t sound like it’s a different thing. The problem is if you are not very aware and very conscious of that. The chances that you will get into that game are really terrible. And by the way, Let me clarify. I’m not saying I’m better at this than anybody. What I have learned over the years, the difference is I have I support where When I get caught into their game, I have two or three people that I can call I say, hey, I am the internationalist with all this news. 99% of the time, the chances that Both are in the same game on low, so one can pull the other one out of the hole. God sent. I have experienced at times where I made that call and we’re both in the same game. That’s not a good call. But it happens, but it’s important. How you are. Handling, in the case of the news, all this information because in the case of the research, Fine. I will have piles galore, but eventually, I will need to decide how I’m going to do this or the research will stay on the table. But in general, that doesn’t produce The anxiety, the depression, all these negative things. With the news specifically, The effect is very direct. And the impact is very negative. 

So that is important to look into this and to what you’re going to do to protect yourself.

Francis Wade | 15:06

I have a friend who visited a relative recently. Spent a few days at the relatives house And, bleh. Guest. Was exposed to the first time to the phenomenon of someone turning on the news and leaving it on. Television. 

Though from six in the morning until Midnight, maybe. The news was on. And it was tuned into some dramatic, something that happened recently, high drama and Breaking news every 10 minutes. And after a few days, and after getting home She noticed that the anxiety didn’t go away and she had to go. Seek the help of a therapist “’cause she said it doth didn’t go away.’ and going to the therapist is what made the difference. And I think in conjunction with what we’re learning about the addictive nature of social media, you know, that Facebook and Google that recently were, or TikTok, one of them, two of them, were recently.

Ray Sidney Smith | 16:05

It was Meta and Google that just lost the case.

Francis Wade | 16:08

Meta lost the case because they’ve been… Fine-tuning their networks to grab people’s attention. And becoming really good at it. It’s been having a knock-on effect on people’s lives. That they’ve not been willing to, you know, sort of own and say, yes, we’ve been cranking up the propensity of people to watch our stuff because we make more money that way. And if there’s byproduct, you know, there’s some blowback or there’s some collateral damage, then well. 

So, It’s not… It strikes me that it’s not so much about research in that sense that I’m looking for answers. It’s… More a book. Today. It’s about managing your environment. 

So that… The unwanted information presented in an unwanted way through an unwanted or an unnoticed channel. Put it that way. That you’re not managing a little private ecosystem that used to be quiet, It’s no longer quiet. Which means that you need to be actively constructing your ecosystem wherever you go. Because if she had brought her habit of not listening to the news. With her. To the visit. And when she noticed that the horse was turning on the news almost 24/7. And if she had said, you know, This is kind of like I don’t know how to say this kind of things, but I want a language for it. She could have said, you know, this is toxic for me. I’m going to have to go somewhere else and put something into my space that is Harmful for me. It’s kind of like smoking, you know, if you’re visiting a friend who’s smoking. There is a passive smoke. 

So this was becoming a problem of that nature. And kudos to her that she noticed it. And she did something about it. But, you know, think of what’s happening all over the world right now. We have a lot of very catchy bad news that’s being spread through all these new channels 24-7 if you want it. We’re not used to managing it the way that we used to. We don’t know to bring this level of awareness. And even if we’re aware, we’re not used to enforcing these kinds of boundaries. With a meter or a google. In which we refuse to participate at some level. And their objective and we pursue our own objectives. 

So beyond the research, I don’t even think information overload is a good name for it anymore, Ray. I think this is beyond what we used to call information overload, so that you’re getting too much things and you want to read them, but you can’t. This is no… 

Some kind of Basic human protection. Something basic. 

Like smoke.

Ray Sidney Smith | 18:51

I think this is contextually different. I think information overload is something different. This is information toxicity. And you are dealing with a level of toxicity here that it doesn’t matter how much volume of information Toxic information is toxic information. And whether it’s negative news, hyperbolic news, you know, all of those kinds of things, I believe that there are just functionally like the onion is fake news. It’s a humor website. Otherwise, I don’t really believe in the concept that has become a political cudgel in some way, shape or form. I’ve kind of ignored that. What I think is really important for everyone to think through is actually How do we scale back the amount of information we’re taking in every day and really curating that? I think one of the first things is that you need to curate the inbound information Before you go out and start researching any particular topic, this information inbound for you does affect your research. And I think that AI here can help in some regards. One, it can help filter out the types of information you want to filter out. You can use tools like ChatGPT to have a scheduled action to look for news every day. Even in Google Workspace, if you have a business account, I believe you can set up. A flow. 

So it says, hey, go look up this type of news every day and then put a brief into my email inbox, and it will just give you a quick brief for those particular items. I have that for certain types of news that’s work-related. That’s very helpful because now I don’t have to go to 15 different sources to go find those. And you can ask it to do things like rate the news source based on their political leaning and their left, right or center and just put a little icon in the news item for that news item. 

Source so I know where they are. And that gives you a little bit better of a control in terms of what you’re reading and why you’re reading and those kinds of things. 

So there are some AI tools that can help in that regard. I think fundamentally, you have to choose to lessen The volume. Of inbound content. As you said, it’s very difficult because they incentivize you to log into Instagram and into YouTube and into TikTok and to these tools that then are very addictive. And so you have to wean yourself off of them on some way, shape or form, either cold turkey or on some diminishing scale, diminishing cadence until you get to that right level where your cortisol levels, basically your fight or flight response, which is technically fight, flight, or freeze is actually one of the most dangerous for humans, certainly in the context of productivity, because fight or flight, you’re actually doing something. At least you’re expending energy. Freeze is that procrastination response or inertia to do something that is positive for you. Freezing is a huge problem for us, and we don’t recognize it as part of the fight, flight, or freeze response. And so when you have that kind of shock or fear-based response, guess what? Your productivity is going to be impacted. 

So you have to reduce all of that information to get to that point and take this out of the news perspective, right? It could just be emails coming from work, an overwhelming number of Slack messages, an overwhelming number of text messages or phone calls from your boss or colleagues or clients. All of those things are information overload and your ability to be able to use AI kind of in the context of what we’re talking about today, is to be able to lessen those so you don’t have as much of that kind of cortisol spike every time you see all of those things happening or mini spikes throughout the day that aggregate becomes the toxicity that we’re really talking about.

Augusto Pinaud | 22:26

I’m waiting for Microsoft or like any of them to a mouth. They’re the use of Cortana or whatever is there Yeah, I think to bring you Going back to you know, the 60s, now that some people will be able to have their AI activator on the teams and you are going to write teams or whatever is the communication methods. And it’s like, hey, I am So and so, yeah, tell me how can he help you instead of interrupting him? 

So we’re going to go back Sometimes you find them out and you call people to theirself and then you go, “Okay, this is their AI. What is it we are going to interrupt in this person?” It is going to be very interesting.

Ray Sidney Smith | 23:09

We’re seeing that already. I’m predominantly in the Google Workspace ecosystem. And in Google Workspace, in Studio, you’re now able to have it read email and write drafts of emails for you. You could potentially have it send those emails, but I wouldn’t do that. The idea is that it’s preparing emails on my behalf and plopping them into my inbox, sitting there waiting to respond to a client. And all I need to do is now fix the email and respond. It’s in my voice and in looking at my documentation. 

So it has all of my FAQs that are in Google Drive, and it’s able to source all of that information and give a competent response. And of course, I’ve got to still correct it. It’s probably 60, 70, maybe 80% on target. But I’m working from a draft as opposed to a blank slate, and that’s always going to speed up the process for me. And so this is where we can start to deal with some of this information overload which in this case is communications overload. But the goal here is to be able to figure out how to reduce the spigot, right? Kind of lessening the spigot of how much we have to process in terms of information and being able to step back and say, okay, even if I have to process this information, how much work can be done on the other side to kind of lessen the impact?

Francis Wade | 24:23

It’s a nut. Only a volume issue. It’s a quality of information just seems, it just sounds so benign relative to what we’re dealing with nowadays. The word doesn’t seem to match the Impact. Put it that way. It’s a toxic something, but toxic information isn’t necessarily toxic. It’s not one thing or the other. But the combination of the channel the cortisol driving intent The research that they’ve put into it, the video, the graphics, the whole, the combination of all of it. Lifts it off the page. And before information was on a page, and gradually it became an online page and a verbal page, an audio page, a visual page. What we’re having now is lifting impact off of a page. What used to be a page of information is now turned into some kind of impacting vector. That we no need to hopefully one day use AI to manage at scale. I should be able to get up in the morning and say, Okay, today is our newsflash. And I don’t get exposed. My world My TV, my devices, my everything. Tops. Showing me news for the day. And I have a fast. And I take a break. It’s just what needs to happen ultimately here. Information has taken on a different kind of a life of its own. I.

Ray Sidney Smith | 25:48

Find it interesting for me because I am a bit of a news junkie. And so I tend to pay attention to all the productivity and technology news. And I tend to watch and ingest a lot of political news. And so I have to be very conscious about how much time that takes and how I ingest that information. And I’ve always been pretty good at curating. 

So I don’t have that kind of that I think other folks have because I’ve just chosen to have a few different places where I can consume content. And so I decided a long time ago that I would have the very specific . 

Which I happen to use Feedly still, but I’m currently vibe coding my own. And so I have those three things and That’s it. Everything flows in there. And if it doesn’t flow in there, then I’m not reading it. Right. And so Feedly has a facility for receiving newsletters and capturing it into the Feedly interface. 

So all newsletters go in there as well. And that allows me to look at everything in a centralized way. Space. I’ve tried to aggregate all of that into Evernote at some point where I was just kind of forwarding everything into Evernote and it just wasn’t the best. It just wasn’t working because I don’t want Every podcast episode for a lot of podcasts that I’m following, I don’t have those in my podcast app, for example. I literally will just have them in Feedly, follow the RSS feed of the podcast. I can read the titles, see if it’s something that interests me, and only then would I listen to it by downloading it on my podcast app. And so, you know, I’m not getting that constant ping of, These are new episodes of whatever that you need to listen to for things that I don’t care about. 

And then, of course, there are podcasts that I subscribe to and I listen to all of their episodes. So it’s you need to do that level of curating. 

So that you’re able to have a conscious and calming approach to the information inbound in your world. So let’s talk about some of the things that we may want to do to lessen the impact of it that we can do today. 

So what are you doing, Francis, in terms of lessening the information?

Francis Wade | 28:01

Apart from insisting that I’m not watching the news on the television. I’ve noticed that the two feeds that I pay most attention to are YouTube and Facebook. And they’ve both been taken over. And so I can skip the related trauma on my YouTube, the one I watch on the TV. And I skip to the things that are more important to me. And sometimes it realises I’m not watching it anymore and it shows me less and then sometimes I watch something and then it shows me a flow. But Facebook, that’s trying to I’ve used it to keep in touch with friends all over the world. I live in Jamaica. My friends are all over and there’s no other way to know what’s going on with them. Rather than to use Facebook. There was a time when Facebook was only about the feed from other people. And now it’s turned into a trauma, a fire hose of information. I tell you, information is too benign a word for what is coming through my feed. But really what I need to do, and I’m Speaking this through, I know there’s a way to curate Facebook so that it gives you only what you hear from your friends So. This week, I’m going to try that. I’m going to try to see what that is like. Because of Facebook selecting or meta-selecting what it wants me to see. Is I’m not depressed. Geth. But I do notice that it takes more time. Because there’s some fresh angle on what’s happening over there and what’s going to happen today and what’s going to happen in the next 48 hours because there’s a bomb threat. 

You know, that stuff takes time to absorb. And I’m thinking that that’s not time well spent. That I can get that information. To a more sober source like the New York Times. For example. It’s not urgent when it’s presented that way. It’s not catchy. It’s not sexy, but it’s, Accurate. And all the interim drama. I couldn’t. We’d all turn my Facebook feed. And maybe be the better for it. 

So I’m going to take that on for sure.

Ray Sidney Smith | 29:58

I used to use a Chrome extension. Called Social Fixer. And it worked to limit some of the more deleterious aspects of Facebook. And somehow Chrome has decided, Google has decided that it doesn’t comply with the appropriate standards. And so I’ve been in search of different apps that will hide particular aspects of social networks. 

You know, like I don’t want to see certain things. It’s why I have an ad blocker in my browser, right? I don’t want to see ads. I actually have an ad blocker built into my router. I just don’t, I don’t see those things and I don’t even think about it. And I’m not against ads. I think ads are completely legitimate revenue source for certain businesses. But the reality is that I don’t like them when they’re popping up and overlaying things. That’s just very distracting to me. The goal here is to find tools like that, I would highly recommend you look for Social Fixer. I’m sure it’s still out there and perhaps it works in other browsers. 

So you can try them for Firefox and Safari and Opera and other browsers like Edge and see if they work. But I know that for Chrome, it uninstalled it for me on Chrome and which is very unfortunate. But there are others out there like that. 

So you can at least start in the browser. So that you can control your interactions on social networks. 

And then go to your email and which is going to be kind of your next piece there. And now inside your email, you have tools like Gmail, as Gemini inside of your email and it can start helping you process those emails faster. But you just have a manage subscriptions button in the sidebar of Gmail, such that you can now go in and just unsubscribe from newsletters with the check of a button right there in the interface. 

So it’s making some of these things much more facilitated. And I think that’s helpful.

Francis Wade | 31:58

It’s the sign of the Thames. We can’t escape. What’s happening? And we need to adapt. And I think AI could help us. This is one case where AI could help us to manage. The total volume. And I haven’t seen anything really powerful to really help us to do.

Ray Sidney Smith | 32:13

It yet. Fun words.

Augusto Pinaud | 32:15

It is interesting. Because it’s a sign of the times. And… At the risk of getting old. I thought that We were going to get Better. 

You know, more technology, more access. And yes, we are getting more. The problem is we are getting more of this low You know, we are still in the moment where this needs to crack. 

So, some of that low information, low-level information, really disappear and we get into good information. Because what we are seeing right now is volume. Not necessarily good information. I don’t know if we’re going to see it. It is really going to be a personal decision, you know, as you said, how I’m going to learn to use these tools procure from certain information and from certain places. You mentioned earlier in the show, the onion and the onion used to be a nice place to go for good laughs. And now. With reality, it’s kind of challenging to laugh at some of them because, you know, the reality is sadder than what they are trying to mock. And That is happening. It was a real news, you know, as Francis said. We have these people who are connected to this We’re on of news. 

You know, almost 24/7, all the time they’re up, they have this TV. Saying I mean… My concern is from the productivity perspective, is How aware are you And how or where are you? Of the impact that this is having for you. What I have found Some of the people I work with, they are not necessarily aware. They are in the loop and they feel productive. Being busy doesn’t mean that you are productive. Now we are just busy, but they are not necessarily getting done what is critical, what is important, and to even I was then We are relying of these artificial intelligence tools to find that answer of what is important. Telling me to try to get AI to tell you what is going to be important. But I’m not saying that AI cannot support this. Of course it can. But… The critical point in here is they want AI to give them these answers without the training. Or I mentioned, yes, I have these tools and they can write 60% of the email and then I just need to come and fix it. But in use, my voice, I set up the… That is a different, completely different use of AI when you train AI to… Or with the rules of engagement that you define, than what I have seen on most people that is but on Brain AI, gets them the appropriate answer and.

Ray Sidney Smith | 35:11

Direction. Yeah, I think this is one of those cases where we’re going to continually fight this process, especially as we get more AI involved in the content creation because now you’re going to get more information by volume because the AI can produce more content and at the same time we then need to combat it with AI to be able to lessen that on the other side and that really takes what you talked about Augusto which is this kind of active process that’s required I mean it took me several hours to get that prompt to work properly so that when it filters out the emails and writes them for me it is effective and that’s the kind of work and energy you need to put in to just make one you know, automation work really well. And most people are not really willing to put in that time and energy. And I think your listeners are likely the people willing to do so. You’re already curating content in a particular way because you’re listening to podcasts. And so that’s one way that you can curate and lessen the noise from the signal. And so we’ll pick up in the next episode and we’ll continue talking about more on the research side of things and how we can actually go out there and effectively look for information so that we’re finding the information that we want and we can then collect it and manage it in better ways. Thank you, gentlemen, for this conversation. While we are at the end of our discussion, the conversation doesn’t stop here. If you have a question or comment about what we’ve discussed during this cast, please visit our episode page on productivitycast.net. They’re on the podcast website. At the bottom of the page, feel free to leave a comment or question. We read and respond to comments and questions there. As well, you’re invited to join our listeners group Inside Personal Productivity Club, a digital community for personal productivity enthusiasts that I host, where you can interact with the ProductivityCast team directly. To join for free, visit productivitycast.net forward slash community, and you can get started there. By the way, to get to any ProductivityCast episode fast, simply add the three-digit episode number to the end of productivitycast.net forward slash episode. 

So, episode 100 would be productivitycast.net forward slash 100. Episode 101 would be productivitycast.net forward slash 101, and so on. On productivitycast.net on each episode page, you’ll find the show notes, so links to anything we’ve discussed are easily jumped to from there, along with text transcripts to read and download. If this is your first time with us, please consider adding us to your favorite podcast app. If you click on the subscribe tab on productivitycast.net, you’ll see the instructions to subscribe and or follow us and get episodes downloaded for free every time a new one comes out. If you enjoyed spending time listening and learning with us today, it’d be a great help to us if you added a rating or review in Apple Podcasts or your podcast app if it has a rating and or review feature. Your compliments motivate us and they help us grow our personal productivity listening community. Thank you to those who have left reviews. We’ve seen them and appreciate all the feedback. Keep them coming. If you have a topic or question about personal productivity you’d like us to discuss on a future cast, please visit productivitycast.net forward slash contact. You can leave a voice recorded message or type a message. Into the message box and maybe we’ll use it as a future episode topic. I want to express my thanks to Augusto Pinaud, Francis Wade, and Art Gelwix for joining me here on ProductivityCast each week. You can learn more about them and their work by visiting ProductivityCast.net and visiting the About page. I’m Ray Sidney Smith, and on behalf of all of us here at ProductivityCast, here’s to your productive life.

Voiceover Artist | 38:42

That’s it for this episode of Productivity Cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, with your hosts, Ray Sidney Smith and Augusto Pinault, with Frances Wade and Art Gelwix.